In an increasingly connected virtual world, digital marketing is changing how businesses grow, gain new customers, and generate sales. If your customers are online, you should be, too.
With around three in 10 Americans online “almost constantly,” digital marketing can be a smart investment, allowing you to meet potential and return customers where they’re at. Not sure where to start, though? In this article, you’ll learn:
What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing refers to marketing efforts through electronic devices, the internet, and digital channels. Brands may use digital channels, like websites, social media, and mobile apps to connect with current customers or introduce themselves to potential customers.
Successful digital marketing campaigns often come from leveraging multiple marketing channels, which is also known as multichannel marketing. A multichannel approach combines various digital channels, like social media, blogs, email, and mobile, to reach customers.
Why is digital marketing important for all businesses?
Digital marketing allows e-commerce and brick-and-mortar businesses alike to reach their target audiences more effectively. Online marketing also offers several ways to advertise for cheaper, such as through social media and email marketing.
The biggest boost to businesses you may see from taking advantage of digital marketing is visibility and reaching customers where they are. For example, the number of marketers who say Facebook is critical to their business has increased 83% over the last two years. And since 81% of internet users search for products they’d like to buy online, businesses with an online presence are more likely to grab their attention.
Social media is free and one of the best ways to connect with existing and new customers. Wave Asian Bistro & Sushi, located in Mount Dora, Florida, is an example of a restaurant using social media to reach customers. Their marketing tactic includes posting pictures of delicious-looking meals and giving customers a behind-the-scenes look at the business.
Any brand can leverage social media platforms and search engines to attract new customers. For instance, if you’re an auto repair shop, you can set up a page on Facebook or Google My Business. This way, local customers who are looking for similar services can find you.
Inbound marketing vs. digital
Digital marketing utilizes electronic devices and digital platforms to connect with existing customers and attract new ones. On the other hand, inbound marketing is a marketing methodology that aims to appeal to a target market. Rather than blasting an advertisement to a mass audience, inbound marketing uses digital channels to find specific potential customers and entice them to buy.
Many businesses confuse both practices. So, to help you better understand these terms, here are some differences between inbound marketing and digital marketing:
- Digital marketing is a broad term that refers to any marketing using online platforms, while inbound marketing is a tactical marketing strategy.
- Digital marketing uses standalone tactics, such as search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, pay-per-click advertising (PPC), social media marketing, and email marketing. On the other hand, inbound marketing is a cohesive, long-term approach to reaching specific goals.
- Digital marketing can increase brand awareness, but you’ll need inbound marketing to attract qualified leads and convert them into buyers.
Benefits, goals, and outcomes of digital marketing
There are many benefits, goals, and outcomes of digital marketing. In a way, digital marketing evens out the playing field between big and small businesses.
A few benefits of digital advertising include:
- You can reach a wider demographic through your website or social media.
- You can reach your target audience at a lower cost.
- You can track and measure your online marketing strategies.
- You can personalize and customize offers to appeal to your target audience and engage existing clients.
However, as impressive as digital marketing is, remember that every other business uses it to generate leads and attract customers. So, you must have a focused, measurable, and repeatable goal before starting any campaign. Here are a few examples to get you started.
Building brand awareness
The first goal of your digital marketing campaign could be to build brand awareness. Brand awareness means your target market is aware of your products or services. With this goal and for all your other goals, you should first define what a “successful campaign” means.
For example, you may want to increase your website traffic from 100 pageviews a day to 1,000. Once you’ve set a specific, attainable goal within a set timeline, you can create your strategy. But don’t forget to define how you’ll measure your success.
New product and service awareness
Brand awareness introduces your products or services to potential customers, while product and service awareness is about separating your brand from others in your industry. This part is centered on featuring the benefits of your products and services and showcasing how and why you’re a better provider than your competitors. Educational content marketing is an effective strategy you can use to achieve this goal.
Attract new customers
If you want to attract customers, then it is important to generate brand awareness for your business. Make sure that people looking for a product or service know you’re a seller or provider. For this goal, you could use SEO best practices to reach online users.
Set specific parameters to measure the success of your digital marketing strategy. This way, you can monitor what’s working and what’s not. Your metrics will also show how and where new customers are finding your brand.
Re-engage existing customers
Your online marketing efforts should focus on engaging existing customers even as you try to attract new ones. It’s also more cost-efficient to sell to current customers than convert new ones. An excellent place to start is to look at the data you have on existing customers.
Based on how customers use your website, you can personalize their brand experience and customize your offerings. Or you can anticipate their needs and sell them additional products based on their engagement with you on social media.
Convert new users
Converting new users means turning a visitor into a buyer or a subscriber, depending on your goal. Successful conversion strategies include positive brand experience, effective pricing, easy-to-navigate site layout, and valuable content.
If your goal is to increase your conversion rate, identify which elements of your ads or pages are working. To do this, you may test different headlines, calls to action (CTAs), or images on your ad or landing pages to see which versions lead to more conversions.
KPIs for digital marketing
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are metrics and values used to measure and track the success of a marketing campaign. Before you launch a campaign, have quantifiable goals and metrics to track how you’re doing. This way, you can tweak it as you go. You’ll also be able to see how your short- and long-term goals play into your marketing strategy. Some examples of KPIs include:
Traffic
Traffic refers to visitors to your website, and they’re grouped into different categories depending on how they found you. The most common traffic is:
- Organic traffic: These are online users visiting your site from a search engine due to your inbound marketing and SEO efforts.
- Direct traffic: These are visitors who typed your URL directly. Any traffic that comes from an unknown source, such as media links you’re not tracking, will be categorized under direct traffic, as well.
- Referral traffic: These are visitors who come to your website from another site that isn’t a social media platform or search engine. For example, if an online user clicks a backlink to your site from another blog, they’d be considered referral traffic.
The number of visitors to your site is a good indication of whether your online presence is growing, stagnating, or declining. Tracking traffic is also useful to measure how certain activities affect it. For instance, if you see an increase in traffic after guest posting on a more popular website, that shows you need more backlinks from authoritative sites.
You can also break down the number to track unique or first-time visits and repeat visits. These numbers will tell you where and how you’re attracting new visitors, and repeat visits show you how much of your traffic comes back for more.
Impressions
Impressions are the number of times an advertisement or post is visible in someone’s feed or timeline. It doesn’t necessarily mean the person noticed it, read it, or remembers it. However, impressions are important to track because they represent the top of the customer acquisition funnel.
Your customers need to see you first to be aware of your existence. Then, they can learn about your products or services. For instance, if you have a post on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn that got more interactions than others, you can check impressions on each platform’s analytics dashboard to see if “going viral” had an impact on your brand awareness.
Time on site
Time on site measures how long a visitor spends on your website on average. The time on site measure is also referred to as average session duration. It’s calculated as the total duration of all sessions divided by the number of sessions over a specific time.
Checking your average session duration through Google Analytics is a good starting point to help you identify issues in the customer journey. For example, if your website’s average session duration is 15 minutes and visitors go through multiple pages, but they exit right before hitting “Send Order,” you know where the issue is.
To address the issue, you might improve your site navigation or copy. You can also look at the overall user experience on your site. No one metric can tell you everything you need to know, so measure other KPIs. Then, look at the variety and value of your content. Lastly, make sure your CTAs are clear.
User page and path behavior
The time spent on a page is a vital user engagement metric because it indicates interest. It measures the time a visitor spends on a page of your website. If you’re using Google Analytics, it also tracks how many pages an online user visited on your website before exiting.
On average, a person can read 200 to 250 words per minute. So, to read a 1,500-word blog post would take about six to eight minutes. So, if your blog post is 1,500 words long, but a visitor only spends 15 seconds on that page, they’re probably not interested.
From there, you can analyze what’s making your visitors leave so soon. Is it the topic? Or does it take too long for the page to load? Look at it from the perspective of someone new to your brand and website.
Conversions
Conversions are the number of users who perform the actions outlined in your CTA, whether that’s subscribing to a newsletter, joining an event, or buying a product or service. You can calculate the conversion rate by dividing the number of conversations by the number of unique visitors. Track your conversion rate changes over time using Google Analytics.
A high conversion rate shows the profitability of your site and the value of your content and offers. This metric is arguably the most important KPI because it’s directly tied to your bottom line. For instance, if you increase your conversion rate of visitors to buyers from 10% to 20%, you’ve convinced twice the number of people to buy. In essence, you’ve doubled your revenue.
Return on ad spend (ROAS)
Return on ad spend (ROAS) measures the revenue generated per every dollar spent in an advertising campaign. If you’re like most business owners, your main objective in running ads is probably to make sales. So, tracking your ROAS is the easiest way to do that. Knowing how much your ads are generating in terms of revenue also allows you to adjust your strategy.
To measure ROAS, simply divide ad revenue by the cost of the ad. For example, if you generated $500 in revenue from a Facebook Ads campaign that cost you $100 to run, your ROAS would be 5:1, meaning you made $5 for every $1 spent.
The challenge with ROAS is getting the information you need to calculate it. So, make sure you’re adding all the costs of your campaign and ensure you’re using suitable attribution models to measure revenue and advertising costs. If you’re running Google Ads, consider using Google’s automated bid strategies to set a target ROAS.
Have a brilliant business idea in mind? But not sure how much money will it take to bring your idea to life? Try Startup Cost Calculator to get cost estimates
Cost of customer acquisition (CAC)
The cost of customer acquisition (CAC) refers to the total cost of acquiring a new customer through a specific media channel or campaign divided by the number of new customers for that period. The CAC focuses on the cost of the complete customer journey, from the first contact to making a purchase. It includes advertising costs, creative costs, technical costs, the cost of keeping a marketing team, and more.
Tracking the CAC spend is essential because it helps you make better-informed decisions on allocating your marketing budget to realize higher returns. And with tools like Google Analytics, you can trace paying customers back to the last channel they visited before deciding to buy.
To start, make a spreadsheet and add up marketing costs per channel. For instance, say you have a pay-per-click (PPC) ad with Facebook that costs $200, social media management fees of $500, and a monthly website maintenance cost of $300 for a total of $1,000. If you’ve gained 10 new customers, your CAC for that month would be $100.
The lifetime value of the customer (LTV)
The lifetime value of the customer (LTV) is an important factor when forecasting revenue and setting marketing budgets. The LTV operates on the assumption that a customer who bought from you once will likely buy again. So, with the lifetime value metric, you gain insight into how much revenue every new customer brings to your company throughout their lifetime.
Knowing how much one customer brings can help you budget your marketing resources effectively and efficiently. For instance, let’s say you operate a membership-only business with a monthly fee of $50, and the average member stays for a year. You may decide that the $100 cost of acquisition based on the $600 LTV is a good use of your ad dollars.
Types of digital marketing disciplines
Digital marketing is a vast field with different types of disciplines. Each discipline has a role and territory of its own. In creating a well-rounded strategy, it’s important to know and understand the basics of the following digital marketing disciplines.
Search engine optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your web pages and content to rank higher on a search engine. SEO aims to get your content at the top of a search engine results page (SERP). To achieve this, you should pay attention to the two pillars of SEO, which are off-page and on-page or technical SEO.
The focus of off-page SEO is building your domain authority and relationship with other websites through high-quality backlinks. On the other hand, on-page SEO is the practice of optimizing your content with keywords, meta tags, etc., to rank on the search engines.
The roles and responsibilities of this practice include:
- Boosting your website’s visibility
- Growing your organic traffic
- Attracting new customers through related keywords
- Improving the usability of your website
- Enhancing overall customer experience
Content marketing
Content marketing is the practice of providing your target audience with relevant, informational, or entertaining content. Content can be in any form, such as social media posts, videos, infographics, podcasts, or articles. Your goal with content marketing is to address your target market’s problems or questions.
The roles and responsibilities of this practice include:
- Reaching and engaging with current customers while attracting new ones
- Establishing consumer touchpoints to increase brand awareness
- Building a relationship with your audience by providing valuable information
- Positioning your brand as an authoritative and trustworthy expert in your industry
Search engine marketing (SEM)
Search engine marketing (SEM) is also called paid search or pay per click (PPC). The main goal of SEM is to drive traffic to a website fast. Traffic is driven by allowing businesses to pay for impressions that help to get visitors to their websites. At the same time, each visitor coming from SEM also improves the website’s rankings in the organic search results.
Organic listings are web pages that a search engine like Google shows because it’s deemed valuable for the search term. On the other hand, when a user visits your website by clicking a paid ad, that’s considered a paid search. So, the role of SEM is to be readily available for users already intending to make a purchase.
For instance, if a user wants to find an auto repair shop, they’ll receive the relevant results, including location and other available information. And since sponsored ads are displayed prominently on top and the side of the results page, there’s a high possibility that the person will click on the ad.
Social media marketing
Social media marketing means using social media platforms to reach and engage your audience. Examples of platforms you can use include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, or Quora. If you’re proficient with videos, consider leveraging this by joining TikTok and YouTube.
The roles and responsibilities of this digital marketing practice include:
- Increasing brand awareness and driving traffic to your website
- Gaining new customers through branded video content
- Offering value and expertise through engagement and answering questions
Social media platforms make it easy to control the kind of interactions you have with your target audience. For instance, if you want private discourse, you can create a Facebook group for members only. Similarly, you get to decide what metrics to measure, such as increasing your number of followers or the number of comments, likes, or shares your post received.
PR
Digital PR is a strategy to increase brand visibility and evolve businesses by using online methods. It utilizes SEO, content marketing, influencer outreach, and social media to reach potential customers. PR offers an opportunity to reach a broader audience and allows brands to focus and direct their messaging to a specific market.
The main goal of PR is to build a strong brand and create awareness. Here are a few examples of what brands can do to achieve it:
- Give press releases while making sure they include links back to your website.
- Utilize marketing and blogger outreach to get more mentions on authoritative blogs and social media accounts.
- Publish valuable online content to build reputation and garner high-quality backlinks.
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing refers to a strategy where a brand or an individual called the affiliate earns a commission for marketing a product. The affiliate will promote a product they use and earn a percentage of the profit from each sale. The sales are tracked through unique affiliate links.
The goal of this marketing discipline is to generate sales that benefit both the seller and affiliate. For the most part, it’s built on trust, as consumers generally need to trust the affiliate to buy a product they recommend. Amazon’s affiliate marketing program, Amazon Associates, is one of the largest marketing programs in the world.
Roles and responsibilities of affiliate marketing include:
- Granting company access to motivated marketers to help sell products in exchange for commissions
- Granting companies access to a broader network across industries
- Saving money through low-cost advertising
Display
Digital display advertising is a format where brands target predefined audiences with images or banners. They’re passive forms of online advertising shown to audiences on websites, social media platforms, or mobile apps. Displays appear on top or the side of advertising-supported sites everywhere. They’re usually banners or small boxes promoting a product or service.
Display advertising is an example of outbound marketing. A popular way for businesses to utilize display ads is through Google’s Display Network—the other arm of Google Ads. It’s the equivalent of placing text ads on top of the search engine results pages (SERPs). But instead of text, brands can display ads on a huge network of websites across the internet.
The roles and responsibilities of the practice include:
- Reaching users on millions of websites worldwide
- Creating brand awareness
- Converting consumers who might not have known about you before seeing your ads
Email marketing
Email marketing is a marketing strategy involving sending emails directly to potential and existing customers. Email marketing aims to convert prospects to customers and turn first-time buyers to repeat, loyal customers. When pursuing a repeat customer, it’s important to get your target audience to opt-in to be part of your mailing list—and for them to open, read, and take action on whatever your CTA button asks them to do.
To achieve these goals, here are a few things you can do:
- Personalize your content. (An email subject line of “Dear Client” probably won’t be received as well as a “Dear Wendy.”)
- Offer a clear unsubscribe option.
- Send emails as part of your valued service first and as a promotional tool second. (No one wants to be sold something every time.)
The roles and responsibilities of the practice include:
- Not being tethered to a platform because you own your list
- Reaching your target audience because email is the No. 1 form of written communication
Mobile and app
Mobile marketing is a digital marketing strategy utilizing websites, email, SMS, MMS, social media, and apps. The goal is to reach and maintain the attention of potential customers on their smartphones, tablets, or other mobile devices. Mobile marketing was born out of marketers’ desire to create multichannel engagement and personalized content that is mobile-friendly.
The biggest advantage of mobile marketing is the ability to reach your potential customers where they are. So, make sure you have a responsive design across the board. Proper mobile marketing includes mobile-friendly websites, landing pages, videos, and promos.
The roles and responsibilities of this practice include:
- Expanding your audience reach
- Allowing for more customer data collection
- Giving you the opportunity for direct and fast communication with your target audience
Marketing automation and tech
Marketing automation is the process of using software and technology to automate marketing activities. The goal is to automate online marketing campaigns and sales activities for efficiency. Tasks made easier through automation include email marketing, tracking ad campaigns, posting on social media, and more.
For example, a brand could create an automatic lead generation funnel that gathers an email address, sends a recorded demo, and then invites the prospect to schedule a live demo. If you have an email list of more than 50, marketing automation can save you time, and money and increase your efficiency.
The roles and responsibilities of this practice include:
- Automating repetitive tasks to maximize efficiency
- Creating a personalized experience for customers through automated sales activities
- Reducing human error
- Freeing the team to attend to other problems or issues
Marketing analytics
Marketing analytics is the act of studying marketing performance to maximize its effectiveness and optimize return on investment (ROI). This practice aims to look for patterns in consumer behavior, how the campaign impacted conversions, regional preferences, and more.
For instance, if marketing analytics reveal that your email marketing is responsible for 60% of your revenue, it’s a good idea to continue with that strategy and maybe double your efforts on it.
The roles and responsibilities of this practice include:
- Helping brands generate a higher ROI on their marketing spends
- Providing insight into what drives conversions and brand awareness
- Providing marketers or brands patterns to optimize future campaigns based on what worked and increased ROI
Why all channels must collaborate
A strong multichannel marketing campaign can increase lead generation, lead conversion, and boost revenue. So, whether you’re using email marketing, social media platforms, or Google’s Display Network, maintain consistent messaging and branding across all channels.
Here’s why maintaining a consistent message is vital to your campaign:
- It helps build credibility, reputation, and brand trust. Inconsistent messaging can make your brand come across as disingenuous.
- It makes it easier to pinpoint which channel your audience participates in the most. Creating platform-specific posts within the same topic helps you see where your audience wants to engage. For instance, if you receive more replies to a question or poll on Instagram, you’d know to utilize that platform more.
- It increases the impact of your marketing campaign. Consistent messaging aligns your goals to your strategies and campaign as a whole.
- It increases ROI. Being committed to your message convinces your customers to believe and trust your brand, translating to sales and profits.
Sometimes, data can be disjointed, especially for larger companies. However, for your marketing, sales, and customer service to interact with customers in real-time, they should have access to the same information. Some benefits of sharing data include:
- It aligns teams around a single source of information.
- It eliminates data silos.
- Data can be filtered for relevance as the team contributes and communicates new information.
- It helps different departments within the company deliver a cohesive, consistent customer experience.
8 tips on starting your digital marketing plan
If you’re ready to put together a digital marketing plan, here are a few tips to get started.
1. Understand where your customers are online
Create a buyer persona for your products or services. A buyer persona is a profile of a company’s ideal customer based on data like age, location, job, income, educational attainment, and other factors. Once you know who your customers are, it makes it easier to choose channels to reach them.
For example, if your target market is stay-at-home moms, you’re more likely to connect with them through your website, Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest.
It’s important to understand where your customers are because you don’t want to waste your time, effort, and money looking for them on one platform when you can reach them more easily on another.
2. Align on goals, KPIs, and intended outcomes
Before implementing a marketing campaign, define your goals, and make sure to set up KPIs to measure those goals. For instance, if your goal is to increase brand awareness, and you choose to gain visibility through social media, you can track impressions on the platform to see if it’s increasing. You can also check Google Analytics to see what percentage of your website’s visitors are coming from social media.
It’s important to align your goals with the KPIs you’re tracking because you don’t want to spend time and money monitoring results and KPIs that are not relevant.
3. Define budgets per channel
Depending on your goals and methods to reach them, online marketing can be affordable or expensive. Thus, setting a budget is important because you can easily overspend—and you don’t want that since it will eat up your profits.
So, understand what you’re trying to accomplish and define how you want to achieve them. Then, set a budget per digital marketing channel. For example, to outsource social media management and content creation, you could set a budget of $500 per week for one blog post and the management of two social media accounts.
4. Ensure tracking is set up across all channels
Make sure to set up analytics to measure how each channel is performing. Ensure you’re tracking the KPIs that align with your goals, as well. For example, if you have promotional landing pages on your website that aim to entice people to buy, you should be tracking conversion rates.
Making sure to set up metrics across all channels is important because it’s the only way to gauge if your strategies are working. Without tracking, you won’t have the data to base your decisions on whether to continue or discontinue a strategy.
5. Use consistent brand messaging and assets
To build brand awareness and trust, you need to have a focused message delivered across all channels. Customize the message for the platform. You should also use relevant assets most suited to the platform.
An example of this would be creating videos for YouTube and taking high-quality photos for Instagram. But even while creating platform-specific posts, make sure to retain the consistency and clarity of the brand message. For instance, if your message is clean living, you must ensure that clean living is the focus of your posts and videos.
When your message changes from channel to channel, it can confuse your target audience. They might even think you’re two companies with the same name. So, try to avoid that. Also, make sure to follow the rules of the platform for optimum engagement. For instance, your Instagram audience won’t be expecting long videos, but your YouTube or Facebook audience might.
6. Have all channels communicate planning and strategy
Develop and adapt your internet marketing approach to each discipline. But make sure your strategies align to achieve your short-and long-term goals.
For example, if your short-term goal is to grow your following on social media and your long-term goal is to increase revenue, track your number of followers on social media. Check the increase or decrease of your conversions to see how it relates to the number of followers you gained. Then, adjust your goals and plans as you gather more data and learn.
Cohesion and communication are important between all the channels you’re using for marketing to reach your goals. If you treat the channels as stand-alone strategies, you could end up spending more money to produce the results you want.
7. Test different channels
As you start your digital marketing campaign, try as many channels as you can effectively and efficiently manage. Trying out different channels helps you open up to opportunities for growing your business or revenue. A good way to do this is with social media platforms, as they’re mostly free to use.
Then, track the analytics to see how each channel performs. After some time, you’ll know which channels are producing results and which channels can be eliminated. Don’t limit yourself on channels because the one you reject outright might give you a wider reach to generate customers.
8. Evolve strategy based on how channels perform
Keep monitoring how your content, posts, or emails are performing, and adjust your strategy based on the results. Digital marketing offers flexible growth opportunities. But to grow, you need to track the right metrics, analyze the results, and pivot in the direction of your goals.
The online marketing world is dynamic. So, you should be evolving and adjusting your strategies along with it. Going against the flow could cost you sales, marketing dollars, and time and effort.
Get started with your digital marketing journey
Successful digital marketing campaigns are built on consistency in branding and messaging, using the proper channels, and tracking the right KPIs. With so many platforms and assets to create and track, online marketing can be overwhelming. But if you have defined goals and a strong team to help you achieve your goals, you can take advantage of digital marketing to grow your business.
